Almost all that is known about the transition to flowering in grasses is based on studies of agronomic species. The grain produced by two tropically derived grasses, maize (Zea mays) and rice (Oryza sativa), and a temperate origin grass, wheat (Triticum aestivum), provides most of the world’s food. Other grasses, such as barley (Hordeum vulgare), ryegrass species (Lolium spp.), sorghum (Sorghum...

Successful sexual reproduction in plants depends on the recognition of favourable environmental conditions and the integration of that information with endogenous developmental cues. Flowering in higher plants involves the transition of a vegetative meristem, producing leaves and stems, into a floral meristem, producing flowers. Most of our understanding of the regulation of the floral transiti...

The flowering response of Coleus frederici and Coleus blumei x C. frederici is dependent on the photoperiod; both plants have a critical day length of about 12 hr. The inductive phase, defined as the period when light signals inhibit floral development, started 10 hr after the onset of darkness under 4 and 8-hr photoperiods, and 8 hr after the onset of darkness under a 12-hr photoperiod. Howeve...

Plants precisely time the onset of flowering to ensure reproductive success. A major factor in seasonal control of flowering time is the photoperiod. The length of the daily light period is measured by the circadian clock in leaves, and a signal is conveyed to the shoot apex to initiate floral transition accordingly. In the last two decades, the molecular players in the photoperiodic pathway ha...

Vegetative plants of Xanthium strumarium L. grown in long days were induced to flower by exposure to one or several 16-hour dark periods. The distribution of male and female inflorescences on the flowering shoot was described, and a scoring system was designed to assess the development of the female inflorescences. The time of movement of the floral stimulus out of the induced leaf and the timi...

Naturally occurring polyamines in plants have been implicated in cell division, metabolic activity, floral initiation, and fruit development. The plant growth regulator BM was formulated to stimulate seed production and fruit growth. In this study, it was hypothesized that the addition of BM would increase levels of polyamines for seed induction and have a direct benefit of improving fertilizat...

A gene sequence was isolated from a differential display experiment to ®nd transcripts altered in expression by overexpression of FLORAL PROMOTING FACTOR 1 (FPF1) in Arabidopsis thaliana. The gene, ACD31.2, encodes an a-crystallin domain containing protein with homology to small heat shock proteins. In addition to down-regulation by FPF1 overexpression, the ACD31.2 transcript is also down-regul...